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Explosive Confirmation of Increased Numbers Applying for Missionary Service

Yesterday a tweet went out on Twitter claiming: "On average LDS Church had received 600 missionary applications per week. Last week it received 7,000." This was sent out by a member claiming that his stake president had shared this information. Members took it viral within hours. By the time I got the info it had made it to Facebook. However, there was no verification at the time and so I decided to put my personal feelers out to see if I could find out if this info was legit.

“As Church leaders had anticipated when the change was announced, the number of individuals who have begun the missionary application process has increased significantly. Typically approximately 700 new applications are started each week. The last two weeks that number has increased to approximately 4,000 per week. Slightly more than half of the applicants are women.

These are early numbers and it is difficult to say exactly where we will be over the coming months but we are grateful for the willingness of our members to make the sacrifice to serve people around the world. We recognize that Church members are interested to know additional details on the logistics of this change as discussed after the announcement and look forward to providing more details as the program moves forward.”

According to Joseph Walker at Deseret News, who emphasized that this jump in missionary applications is a 471 percent increase :

Interestingly, the LDS missionary program was already going through a period of growth and change. According to Elder Holland, the church's current missionary force is "a little more than 58,000" – a number that has been growing during recent years."

I'll continue to update this post as more information becomes available. This is one time when something sounded almost too good to be true -- but it is, basically, TRUE!

I was initially skeptical too as the announcement I read stated that 7,000 applications had been processed in the first two weeks. That to me was unrealistic as the process of application can take months when you consider the medical and dental reports needed. But I noted that the official announcement today specifically stated that the increase of 4,000 per week is based on new applications begun, not completed. But, in all it is an amazing outcome and very exciting.